Mockery Blog

I play guitar left-handed, which is kind of a pain in the ass when it comes down to it. I can’t play anyone else’s guitar and they can’t play mine. When I go to the guitar store, there are usually only a couple of lefties and they’re usually pretty unspectacular.

Most times when I mention this to people they ask me why I didn’t just learn to play right-handed. After all, it would be my left hand that would be doing the “hard” part. And, in fact, I tried it when I was first starting. Thing was, it just felt wrong. I didn’t enjoy it until I flipped the guitar over and played it the way it felt right. Years later, I’m still happily shredding.

The suggestion to “just play right-handed” is well-meaning but wrong. There is a reason that right-handed people (almost) universally play guitar right-handed. There is a real connection between plucking and strumming and the dominant hand. It just works that way for most people. Fighting to overcome that natural tendency is not fun, and when playing music is not fun people do not learn to play. I think you’d be doing a disservice to an aspiring guitarist if you told him or her to flip the guitar over and play it the other way because that’s just the way it’s done.

Software, I think, is a lot like that. You can force people to try to accommodate your interface. If your app is important enough to them, they may even fight their way through the pain and continue to use it. But if you continually tell people to do things in a way that is uncomfortable and unintuitive for them, people who are just getting started are going to bail out and give up on you because it’s not worth the pain to them. If I ever get tempted to cut a corner UI-wise, I’m going to try to remember how it felt to try to play that right-handed guitar 15-odd years ago when I was getting started.